This episode is presented by Invincible Verses, available now on Xbox series consoles,

PlayStation 5, and PC. Invincible Verses is a brutal 3V3 tag fighting game from Studio

Quarter Up, Skybound Entertainment's first in-house game development studio, where you can play

as your favorite characters from the

Invincible Universe.

This game is designed to let you become a superhero in the bloodiest fight in the universe,

made by a dev team of fighting game veterans, and with the direct input from creator Robert

Kirkman.

Invincible Verses is full of the visceral, bloody combat, and authentic depictions

of destruction and chaos that Invincible fans know and love.

Plus, a story by the creators behind the hit TV series.

At launch, the roster includes 18 playable fighters, including Invincible himself, Mark Grayson, plus Omneman, Rexpload, and more.

At the dawn of the new millennium, PlayStation was sitting pretty.

Sony's first video game system surprised everyone in the 90s leapfrogging Nintendo and Sega to become the best-selling home console of the decade.

Feel a little like your days are numbered?

By offering more sophisticated 3D games with more mature imagery and themes,

PlayStation had changed the reputation of video games from what was mostly still seen as a juvenile pastime

into truly mainstream entertainment for all ages.

Sony was now ready to launch its successor, the PlayStation 2, but there was no

guarantee that lightning would strike twice. I think the key word for the next generation PlayStation

is emotion. Despite birthing classics like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda, Ocarine of Time,

and GoldenEye 007, the 4-year-old Nintendo 64 was in a distant second place behind PlayStation. Nintendo's decision to go with expensive cartridges for the N64, instead of cheap discs like the competition, had pushed away many third-party publishers leading to software droughts. And Nintendo's overall kid-friendly image was starting to feel quaint, next to the edgy, cooler, PlayStation, and Sega brands. Would you rather be in home shooting a bazook? You're watching a chick-click. Chick-click, bazook-plick-Bizuka. But despite this struggle, Nintendo did have complete dominance of the handheld market and had a plan to give its family-friendly image a significant makeover. Sega's Dreamcast was only a few months old in the U.S. and had an early hit with Soul Calibur, but most of its best games had yet to arrive. Over the next 12 months, Sega would play its hand almost perfectly in its efforts to sell the Dreamcast, but still failed to survive. So what went wrong? The year 2000 would see the launch of the best-selling console ever and many of the highest-rated games ever. It was an exciting time that felt like gaming was about to explode with new innovations,

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